More fun with the Jesus people

My office in the university is in a central location, at the intersection of two main streets that cut through the campus. If I look outside my window, I have a good chance of seeing most of the university community passing by during any given day. As a result, the street corner outside my office is a popular place for people who want to hand out religious tracts.

In days gone by, when approached by such people I would politely decline their offers and walk away. But now, if I am not in a hurry to go somewhere, I take the opportunity to question them about their beliefs. I take the Socratic approach of asking questions and then build on their responses by asking more questions, which I find leads to far more interesting discussions than trying to simply prove to them that they are wrong. (For my previous encounters with Jesus people, see here, here, and here. It’s all good clean fun.)

This happened again a few weeks ago, when a genial man about my age approached me at the intersection and asked me [Read more…]

The Republican debate crowds run amuck again

In an earlier post, I noted that in the first three of the interminable series of Republican debates, the main story was the response by the crowds, cheering wildly at the most extreme policies while booing anything that seemed tempered and reasonable and humane. One suspected that the crowds in subsequent debates were told to tone it down to prevent the impression being given that Republican voters were nuts.

But in Monday’s Republican debate, the crowds seem to have slipped their leash and were back in full baying frenzy. The Daily Show captured the moments.

We’re number one?

Dave Barry, columnist for the Miami Herald, is one of the funniest writers and for years he got a lot of mileage out of documenting the things that the people of Florida and Miami did that convinced him that it was the craziest state in the nation. He is fortunate to have retired from his weekly column because recent events suggest that my state of Ohio may well take that particular crown.

Consider the following recent stories that have garnered national attention for our state.

  • The owner of over 50 dangerous exotic animals abruptly released them, resulting in 48 of them (including 18 Bengal tigers, 17 lions, and eight bears) having to be killed.
  • We had an Amish sect led by a renegade bishop go on a rampage, cutting the beards of fellow Amish who had for whatever reason displeased him. He was improbably named Sam Mullett.
  • We then had the so-called ‘Craigslist killer‘, a 52-year old who claimed to be a chaplain in a church, who is charged, along with a 16-year old associate, with luring people to a remote area with the promise of a job to oversee some land and then hunting them down and killing them.
  • Then there was the case of an 8-year child who was taken away from his mother by the child protective services and put in foster care because they feared that the child was dangerously obese and the mother was not doing anything about it.
  • We have people putting forward a bill in the state legislature that would ban abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected, which could occur as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. This attempt has caused a deep split in the anti-abortion movement.
  • We had the owner of an apartment complex put a sign up that said the swimming pool could be used by white people only.

I am not claiming that Ohio has definitely become the craziest state in the nation. But we may at last have a shot at a national championship that has long been denied us in the sports arena.

Stephen Colbert asks people to vote for Herman Cain

Since the South Carolina primary ballot was locked some months ago, Stephen Colbert cannot get on it and Herman Cain can’t get off it, although the latter has dropped out of the race. So Colbert is urging everyone in the state to vote for Cain as a proxy to show their support for his own candidacy.

And here is the ad that is being run in South Carolina right now by the The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC, also known as the America for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow Super PAC.

Cain has actually agreed to join Colbert for a rally on Friday in South Carolina.

Telling only half the story

The US government loves to pontificate to other countries about human rights and how they should improve their human rights record and increase democracy. As Ivan Eland writes:

Don’t get me wrong: the proliferation of democracy and human rights in the world is a great thing, but the arrogant belief that America should be the aggressive, high-profile guardian of the spread of such laudable beliefs is not. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the attack on Libya, all done at least ostensibly to usher in democracy and human rights, have further sullied the already shaky reputation of America’s forceful push for such causes around the world. In practice, the divergence of U.S. foreign policy from rhetoric promoting democracy and human rights makes other nations and peoples suspicious of American intentions.
…
Even in the cases in which the U.S. was genuinely interested in promoting democracy and human rights, foreign countries that meddle constantly in other nations’ business usually don’t get the benefit of the doubt among the locals. And who can blame them? America has restrictions against foreign involvement in U.S. elections, but that doesn’t stop the United States from funding political groups in Russia and other countries. Such hypocrisy doesn’t do America, the local political groups, or the promotion of democracy and human rights any favors.

But it looks like what other countries are doing is [Read more…]

Is this the future for American workers?

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show looks at the working conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese mega-factory which manufactures so many of the electronic products that we use. The working conditions are so appalling that the company has to take suicide-prevention measures, all so that we can save about 25% on the prices of these gadgets.

There is no doubt that the US oligarchy would love to see American workers in the same situation, as can be seen by their union-busting efforts. Some of us may ridicule Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that we should replace each union janitorial job with 30 child laborers, but bear in mind that this is how the oligarchy thinks, that their goal is to maximize profits and their ideal of ‘efficiency’ is to drive wages down as low as they can go.

The members of the oligarchy live in a different world

In an earlier post, I discussed all the ways that wealthy people can reduce the rate at which they pay taxes, using measures that are not available to ordinary people, and which results of them paying at much lower rates than middle class people do.

Mitt Romney had for a long time refused to release his tax returns and suspicions were that this was because he was in fact paying at a lower rate than most people because of those above methods. Under pressure he has (sort of) agreed to release his returns around (maybe) April, and conceded that he does pay only about 15%, the same rate as the marginal rate on people whose income is in the range $8,375 to $34,000, which is even below the media income.

But the additional tidbit that was tucked away in his statement about his income was when he said, “And then I get speakers’ fees from time to time, but not very much.” It turns out that his total income from speaking fees for 2010 was $374,327.62, for an average of $41,592 per speech.

When your fees per speech is close to the median household income, and your total income from speeches alone put you in the top 2% of income earners, and you consider it ‘not very much’, then you really are living in a different world.

The blurring of the line between the police and military

The purpose of the military of any nation is purportedly to defend the nation from external attacks. But an important other function is to protect the oligarchy from its own people and time after time this has been the experience of many countries, with the military being used to crush its own people’s legitimate aspirations for freedom and democracy.

Sometime ago, I wrote about the dangerous trend of the paramilitarization of the police in the US so that they have begun to look more like the military and use military tactics against civilians. Via BoingBoing, I tried my hand at this quiz created by Radley Balko showing 21 photographs and asking the viewer to identify whether the people shown were police or the military. I got just 11 correct, which was what one would expect by random chance, which is not surprising since I was forced to guess on almost all of them, they look so alike.

In the US, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was enacted to prevent the government from using the military for civilian police work. The barriers in that act have been steadily eroded over the last three decades and the recently enacted National Defense Authorization Act that was rushed through Congress with no hearings and little debate and signed by president Obama on New Year’s eve pretty much gutted it.

Why do this now? I have my suspicions that the oligarchy has a real fear of mass unrest if the economic conditions for most Americans worsen and sees the Tea Party and Occupy movements as precursors to a major challenge to its rule. They want to have all the tools at their disposal if there is a danger of things spinning out of control.

How religion undermines reasoning abilities

Some time ago, P. Z. Myers made an important point. Atheists tend to find the beliefs of religions so incredible that we cannot believe that the people we know well personally, who seem to be perfectly rational in other areas of their lives, take those beliefs at face value. So we tend to delude ourselves that they consciously pay only lip service to the tenets of their religions and belong to religious institutions purely for the social benefits they get from belonging to the group. Hence we are surprised when we discover that we could not be more wrong. He says,

Many of us find it really hard to believe that Christians actually believe that nonsense about Jesus rising from the dead and insisting that faith is required to pass through the gates of a magical place in the sky after we’re dead; we struggle to find a rational reason why friends and family are clinging to these bizarre ideas, and we say to ourselves, “oh, all of her friends are at church” or “he uses church to make business contacts” or “it’s a comforting tradition from their childhood”, but no, it’s deeper than that: we have to take them at their word, and recognize that most people who go to church actually do so because they genuinely believe in all that stuff laid out in the Nicene Creed.

It makes the phenomenon of religion even scarier, doesn’t it?

Yes, it does, because [Read more…]